Doug Ragan's blog

If you are like me and pretty much what seems like ALL of my high schools students, then you probably have a mobile device near you and you are also aware of the effect water has on turning that most precious piece of  “I can’t live without it” into a paperweight. 

 Last year while attending the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education at GVSU I had the opportunity to hear a talk that showed a video of a chemical demonstration showing the burning of magnesium metal.  We have all seen many of these videos (thank you YouTube) and probably have performed this demo for our own students many times.  During the video it may have been represented with a chemical equation followed by the students being asked to balance the equation or maybe even predict the products.  Although the use of video including the showing of the equation nicely represents the macroscopic and symbolic representation, what was so unique about this particular video is that it also included the particulate representation embedded on top of the video of the demo.  This was the first time I had seen the particulate level representation done like that and so I was intrigued in wanting to find more of these representations.  

In my high school chemistry classes, I stress the use of units and the use of written chemical formulas to be represented properly.  It is important to me that when a student expresses the formula of a chemical either in their data or in a balanced equation that they represent it correctly.

We teach it, some celebrate it, and we try to make it engaging for our students. What is it? The mole concept and Mole Day! So how do we make it engaging for our students? Let me introduce #molympics.

Twitter data for #BCCE2014

In reference to the recent posting by Deanna Cullen and the list of where to find articles such as